AA: Pasi "Sleeping" Myllymäki's self-portrait for the Venice Biennale 2017: an interview as a self-interview as an anti-interview. Conducted in English with excerpts from three vintage movies made by Myllymäki together with Risto "Legend" Laakkonen they introduce his "glorious studio" (a humble barn), a pole dance, and a ride under ten tractors. Modest in means, rich in wit.

AA: Based on Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen's The Coal Coast photographs and the stories of the ex-miner Freddie Welsh, set to sound by So Percussion. An elegy of an industrial way of life, destroyed by Margaret Thatcher. Meditative and poetic, with a sense of the surge of the sea and the patina of time.

Marjo Viitala: Valehtelija / The Liar.

VALEHTELIJA
LIAR GIRL
Marjo Viitala | Finland 2018 | Fiction | 15 min
TFF: "Liina lives together with her mother. Her mother is often working night shifts so Liina needs to get by herself. In the same staircase, where Liina and mother live, is an apartment where a man died some time ago. One morning Liina hears a dog barking from the apartment. Liina starts making up a story of the dog and tells it to everyone during the day. A nightly rendezvous in the dead man’s apartment makes Liina’s stories become the truth." "Liina asuu äitinsä kanssa. Äiti on usein yövuorossa, joten Liinan on pärjättävä yksin. Samassa rapussa on asunto, jossa eräs mies jokin aika sitten kuoli. Eräänä aamuna Liina kuulee koiran haukuntaa tuosta asunnosta. Hän alkaa sepittää tarinaa koirasta ja kertoo sitä päivän aikana kaikille. Yöllinen kohtaaminen kuolleen miehen asunnossa muuttaa Liinan tarinat todeksi."

AA: The story of Liina, a schoolgirl and daughter of a single mother. Liina is a compulsive liar who is getting more and more hopelessly tangled in the web of her fabrications. The barking of a dog behind a door of a dead tenant and the discovery in the washroom that laundry has been stolen lead her to meet a boy without means and addicted to drugs. Fiction turns to reality, and reality turns out to be more complex than could have been anticipated. Well made and intriguing.

Henna Välkky, Eesu Lehtola: Me olemme unessa / We Are in a Dream.

ME OLEMME UNESSA
WE ARE IN A DREAM
Henna Välkky, Eesu Lehtola | Finland 2017 | Animation, Documentary, Experimental | 7 min
TFF: "There is a line of men chasing us through a city where we can’t run. The escape is gruelling, our feet are wet and we drown deeper. We are not afraid, we have seen this before. This film is based on personal recordings of people narrating their recurring dreams." "Joukko miehiä ajaa meitä takaa halki kaupungin, emmekä voi juosta. Pako on uuvuttavaa, jalkamme ovat märät ja vajoamme syvemmälle. Emme pelkää, olemme nähneet tämän aiemminkin. Elokuva perustuu ihmisten kertomuksiin toistuvista unistaan."

AA: Over two years in the making, created and layered using many animation techniques, based on people's accounts of their recurrent dreams, a fascinating montage in the cyberworld, with a feeling of movement in depth, apparitions emerging and re-emerging, "and then I wake up".

Teppo Airaksinen: Katto / The Ceiling.

KATTO
THE CEILING
Teppo Airaksinen | Finland 2017 | Fiction | 15 min
TFF: "On the brink of divorce a middle aged man, Olavi, retreats to his cabin by the lake. After a few days he finds that the ceiling has come down making him unable to stand up straight. His friend Tuomas arrives and insists that something has to be done whereas Olavi is content with the limited space. The two men start lifting the ceiling – but which of the men is really in need of help?" "Avioeron partaalla oleva keski-ikäinen Olavi vetäytyy rantamökilleen. Muutaman päivän kuluttua hän huomaa, että katto on romahtanut eikä hän mahdu enää seisomaan suorassa. Olavin ystävä Tuomas saapuu paikalle ja vaatii, että jotain on tehtävä. Olaville rajallinen tila kuitenkin riittää. Miehet alkavat nostaa kattoa paikoilleen, mutta kumpi onkaan enemmän avun tarpeessa?"

AA: In a way The Ceiling is the opposite to Quadraturin screened yesterday. In it the tenant's tiny room kept expanding. In The Ceiling the retreat cabin's ceiling keeps sinking. Perhaps the phenomenon is a signal alerting Olavi that life is not in control. An intriguing tale of depression.

PUOLI YHDEKSÄN RAIVO
PRIME TIME RAGE
Sanni Priha | Finland 2017 | Documentary | 30 min
TFF: "For every generation there is a war story to be told. The story is told in the evenings.It is like a movie about the good and the bad, us and them, profits and losses.Some images are so impressive that they are turned into symbols and monuments;beginnings, turning points and endings. This is a film about the story of warwhich the evening news told to us, growing up in the 1990s.The story was told with images of burning oil fields. It was reported that on its withdrawal the defeated side ignited the oil wells in fire, causing major financial losses.There were no images of human casualties. The story began when we we kids and it still goes on." "Jokaisella sukupolvella on sotatarina kerrottavanaan. Se kerrotaan iltaisin, ja se on kuin elokuva hyvästä ja pahasta, meistä ja niistä, voitoista ja tappioista. Jotkin kuvat ovat niin vaikuttavia, että niistä tehdään symboleita ja muistomerkkejä – alkuja, käännekohtia ja loppuja. Tämä on elokuva sotatarinasta, joka kerrottiin meille 1990-luvulla kasvaneille iltauutisissa. Tarinan kuvituksena olivat palavat öljykentät, jotka hävinnyt puoli tarinan mukaan sytytti vetäytyessään ja aiheutti näin mittavat taloudelliset tappiot. Ihmisuhreista ei näytetty kuvia. Tarina alkoi, kun olimme lapsia, ja se jatkuu edelleen."

AA: A meta-documentary on television's evening news bulletins. A focus is on the events 25-30 years ago: the end of the cold war, the fall of the wall, the liberation of Mandela. Another focus is on the US wars in the Middle East. A further one is on Finland's years of depression in the early 1990s when many people lost their financial security after a crash of the banking system based on a reckless credit practice. Finland's contribution to the international arms trade is another theme. The film is about the experience of war, violence becoming mundane and a sense of fear becoming permanent through television news bulletins. An interesting film which gives a lot to think about. The burning oil wells in the deserts of the Gulf War looked devastating on the big screen of the Plevna 2 cinema.

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: PASI SLEEPING MYLLYMÄKIN AT THE VENICE BIENNALE AND SONG FOR BILLY AT THE AMBER WEBSITE:BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: PASI SLEEPING MYLLYMÄKIN AT THE VENICE BIENNALE AND SONG FOR BILLY AT THE AMBER WEBSITE:

Pasi “Sleeping” Myllymäki’s and Mika Taanila’s art will be presented in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017. Produced by Moderna Museet, Sweden, and curated by Mats Stjernstedt, the exhibition Mirrored brings together Nordic artists from different generations. Other representants include Charlotte Johannesson and Nina Cannell (Sweden) and Siri Aurdal and Jumana Manna (Norway).

The exhibition features a selection of Pasi “Sleeping” Myllymäki‘s (b. 1950) super 8 films from the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Myllymäki made several dozens of anarchist and inventive super 8 films with Risto “Legend” Laakkonen between 1976 and 1985. Myllymäki’s films have been presented domestically and internationally e.g. at Avanto Festival (2006), VIDEO-EX (2009), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2014), Videomedeja (2014), and Mänttä Art Festival (2016).

Mika Taanila will present in Venice a new series of artworks based on film criticism. Mika Taanila (b. 1965) is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. He works with documentaries, experimental film and visual arts. Human engineering, utopias, failures and man-machines are recurring themes in his films and installations. Taanila’s short films have been screened altogether at more than 300 international film festivals and special events. In 2015, Taanila was awarded with the prestigious Ars Fennica Award, the biggest Finnish art award.

Commissionned and produced by Frame Contemporary Art Finland, The Finnish Pavilion will present an immersive multimedia installation by Erkka Nissinen and Nathaniel Mellors, curated by Xander Karskens (De Hallen Haarlem).

La Biennale di Venezia, May 13 – November 26

SONG FOR BILLY from the Amber Films site:

In 2017 we completed Song for Billy, a 20 minute film using Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s The Coal Coastphotographs and new footage from the beaches of East Durham. It was developed in collaboration with the New York musicians and composers, So Percussion and Easington ex-miner Freddie Welsh.

We’d wanted to make a film with The Coal Coast photographs since the completed exhibition was premiered at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art back in 2003. We’d also been talking about doing a live score film project for a while. When Forma / East Durham Creates suggested a possible Coal Coast collaboration with So Percussion we were more than happy to meet up with them. Sitting round a table in a cafe in Seaham both Amber and So felt the collaboration could work…

Sirkka set to digitising her negs, expanding the range of the imagery. We experimented with timelapse video and the rhythms it generated. We exchanged material with So Percussion, who were writing pieces back in New York. In the middle of this we were drawn to the storytelling of Easington ex-miner Freddie Welsh. A live scored version was premiered in August 2016 at St John’s Church, Seaham, as part of Forma / East Durham Creates’ From Out A Darker Sea, and has since been performed in the USA and toured in England. The standalone version formed part of a Side Gallery exhibition of The Coal Coast in 2017 and has been shown at a number of film festivals

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About Me

Antti Alanen (born 1955) is Film Programmer at National Audiovisual Institute (Finland), which runs the Cinema Orion in Helsinki. This diary is an irregular notebook and scrapbook of rough notes on films and related matters. Spoiler alert: I spoil everything because for me plot and conclusion are essential to discuss!

Jazz Record of the Week 29/2017

Jazz Record of the Week 29/2017

Freddie Redd Quartet: The Music from The Connection [1960] (Freddie Redd Six Classic Albums 2/6)

Jazz Record of the Week 29/2017

Introducing Freddie Redd (Freddie Redd Six Classic Albums 1/6)

Jazz Record of the Week 28/2017

Kenny Dorham: Jazz Contrasts

Jazz Record of the Week 20/2017

Joe Henderson: Page One

Jazz Record of the Week 17/2017

Miroslav Vitouš: The Bass

Jazz Records of the Week 16/2017

Billie Holiday: All or Nothing at All (5 Original Albums 5/5)

Jazz Records of the Week 16/2017

Billie Holiday: Stay with Me (5 Original Albums 4/5)

Jazz Records of the Week 16/2017

Billie Holiday: Songs for Distingué Lovers (5 Original Albums 3/5)

Jazz Records of the Week 16/2017

Billie Holiday: Body and Soul (5 Original Albums 2/5)

Jazz Records of the Week 16/2017

Billie Holiday: Lady Sings the Blues (5 Original Albums Box Set 1/5)

Jazz Record of the Week 14/2017

The Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin: The Inner Mounting Flame

Jazz Record of the Week 13/2017

Eero Koivistoinen: For Children

Jazz Record of the Week 8/2017

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman

Jazz Record of the Week 7/2017

Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: In a Mellotone

Jazz Record of the Week 6/2017

Duke Ellington: Piano Reflections

Jazz Record of the Week 5/2017

Miles Davis: Bitches Brew

Jazz Record of the Week 4/2017

Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus

Jazz Record of the Week 3/2017

Dollar Brand Quartet: Africa – Tears and Laughter

Jazz Record of the Week 52/2016

Albert Ayler: Goin' Home

Jazz Record of the Week 49/2016

Charles Lloyd: Forest Flower, live at Monterey

Jazz Record of the Week 48/2016

Sinikka Oksanen, Antero Stenberg, Radio Sessions 1959-1966

Jazz Record of the Week 47/2016

Django Reinhardt Vol. 6: 1940: Nuages

Jazz Record of the Week 43/2016

The Essence of Louis Armstrong (Phontastic, Sweden, 1987)

Jazz Record of the Week 42/2016

Tomasz Stańko: Balladyna

Jazz Record of the Week 39/2016

Cannonball Adderley: Somethin' Else

Jazz Record of the Week 38/2016

Tommy Flanagan Trio: Overseas

Jazz Record of the Week 37/2016

Miles Davis: Miles Smiles

Jazz Record of the Week 36/2016

Red Garland Trio: Groovy

Jazz Record of the Week 35/2016

John Coltrane: My Favorite Things

Jazz Record of the Week 34/2016

The Dave Brubeck Quartet: Time Out

Jazz Record of the Week 33/2016

Christian Schwindt Quintet: For Friends and Relatives

Jazz Record of the Week 32/2016

Carola & Heikki Sarmanto Trio

Jazz Record of the Week 25/2016

Cecil Taylor: Silent Tongues

Jazz Record of the Week 24/2016

Sonny Rollins: A Night at the Village Vanguard (1957, 2 cd reissue 2016)

Jazz Record of the Week 23/2016

Charlie Mingus: Blues & Roots

Jazz Record of the Week 22/2016

Mal Waldron: Moods

Jazz Record of the Week 21/2016

Django Bates: Belovèd Bird

Jazz Record of the Week 20/2016

Jacques Loussier Trio: The Original Play Bach Vols. 1 & 2

Jazz Record of the Week 19/2016

Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges: Side by Side

Jazz Record of the Week 18/2016

Ray Charles: Genius+Soul=Jazz. Complete 1956-1960 Sessions with Quincy Jones (Genius+Soul=Jazz, The Genius of Ray Charles, The Genius Hits the Road, and from The Great Ray Charles and The Genius After Hours)